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John Lemke

Final U in English Words - 0 views

  • “English words don’t end in u,”
  • The only two native English words that end in u are the pronouns thou and you, but they probably shouldn’t count because they really end in ou.
  • There remain 50 or so “English” words that do end in u. I put English in quotation marks because most of these u-words obviously came undigested from some other language, most from French.
John Lemke

How Many Tenses in English? - 0 views

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    Linguistically there are only two but...
John Lemke

Complacent vs. Complaisant - 0 views

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    "Both complacent and complaisant descend from Latin complacere, "to please, to be pleasant," but they have acquired different meanings in English."
John Lemke

Kn- Words in English - 0 views

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    Some "Kn" words you know and, most likely, a few new ones for your vocabulary.
John Lemke

Anecdote and Anecdotal - 0 views

  • The earliest meaning of anecdote in English is “Secret, private, or hitherto unpublished narratives or details of history.” Later, the word came to have its present meaning: “The narrative of a detached incident, or of a single event, told as being in itself interesting or striking.”
  • The adjective anecdotal dates from the 18th century. It can mean simply “pertaining to anecdotes,” but in modern usage it is often used in the sense of “unreliable.”
John Lemke

Plain Language: Improving Communications from the Federal Government to the Public - 0 views

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    A good resource for making you writing understandable.
John Lemke

How to Make Absolutely Sure Your Article Gets Killed - 0 views

  • When your article assignment is to write 1,000 words and you turn in 2,000 words, it creates all kinds of problems for your editor. She’ll need to comb through your article and decide which 1,000 words she can cut. After all, she has only so much space, so she has to make it fit. Now, don’t get all wishy-washy on me and turn the extra material into a bonus sidebar. Just squish all those extra words in there and let your editor deal with it.
  • Avoid showing even a modicum of personality. If you want your article killed, it should look like it was written by a robot…a robot that doesn’t speak English.
  • When you get an assignment, your client will send you a little thing called an assignment letter, which details the specs of the assignment. Ignore this.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • If those don’t work out, over-rely on source-finding services like ProfNet and Help a Reporter Out, using whoever happens to respond — and whatever you do, do NOT check out the sources you get from there to make sure they’re credible.
  • When the editor asks you for backup on your facts, tell him you’re the backup. And whenever you get the chance, inject your opinion into the article.
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